Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: employment

  • Airtasker and the future of work

    Airtasker and the future of work

    Tim Fung, the co-founder of Airtasker, has been previously been interviewed on this blog about micro tasking service’s mission to change the workplace.

    With the news that that Airtasker had gone into a partnership with employment site CareerOne it seemed Tim might be a good guest to kick off the first video for the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

    During the interview Tim describes the motivations behind starting Airtasker, how he sees the relationship with CareerOne evolving and the benefits of operating out of a co-working space.

    The Tank Stream Labs working space is an interesting setup – based at the bottom of Pitt Street in the heart of Sydney’s financial centre, it’s not in the more edgy areas on the city fringes where the rest of the town’s workspace are located.

    Being away from the hipsters and grunge doesn’t seem to have hurt Tank Stream Labs as the space has now expanded to a second floor of the ten storey office block. The roll call of tenants is quite impressive too.

    For Tim being in the workspace has been a great benefit for Airtasker.

    There’s always the thing about sharing knowledge and more obviously there’s a lot of great contacts that everyone shares.

    Airtasker’s relationship with employment site CareerOne is an interesting development that sees the joint venture between News Limited and Monster move into the crowdsourcing field. It also gives job hunters an opportunity to find short term work while looking for a more permanent role.

    People are looking for more hours of work but equally businesses were coming to CareerOne and saying ‘hey, all you do is full time work’ and that’s only one piece of the employment puzzle.’

    For CareerOne it really allows them to build up the full spectrum – all the way from tasks to part time to full time and be a one stop shop for employment.

    How that works for CareerOne remains to be seen, but for Airtasker and Tim it validates their business model along with exposing their service to a wider audience.

    With the workforce evolving and the trend to informal, casualised employment; services like Airtasker and the US Task Rabbit will take a more prominent role in workers’ careers. While it’s debatable on how desirable or stable such employment is, it’s the reality of a process that started in the 1970s.

    Tim takes a more sanguine view of the challenges facing workers in an informal employment market.

    What I’m sharing on Airtasker is my free time. Currently we have this pool of literally tens of thousands of hours of people sitting around saying ‘I’d love to have a job’ and that’s an underutilised resource.

    Airtasker in many ways is one of the new breed of middlemen creating markets where one didn’t exist before. The service is an example of how new ways to communicate create opportunities to connect buyers and sellers.

    Services like Airtasker are part of the future that’s very different to the world we or our parents grew up. It’s going to be interesting to see how society and governments evolve around the realities of today’s workplace.

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  • Expat workers and their fragile, guilded cage

    Expat workers and their fragile, guilded cage

    I was sitting on the back of a motorbike grimly clutching a briefcase full of 100 baht bills when the realities of working in Thailand really dawned on me.

    One of the downsides of being the contracts administrator in an Engineering company is that one gets stuck with the jobs that doesn’t fit anybody’s official duties.

    This time it was going to rescue Ken – not his real name – a Kiwi Project Manager who instead of enjoying Friday afternoon in a Soi Cowboy beer bar was under siege in his site hut in suburban Bangkok.

    Because of a glitch in the insanely bureaucratic payroll system our Singaporean employers used, Ken’s labourers hadn’t been paid and now they were threatening to burn down the site hut with Ken and his office staff in it.

    So the story of Chip Starnes, the US businessman freed yesterday after being held hostage by former employees in his Beijing office for six days, is very familiar. It’s a story that expat workers should understand about their status and position when they take an overseas assignment.

    While Chip seems to have come out of the ordeal unscathed apart from being in need of a good night’s sleep and a shower, it could have been much worse; shortly after I left Thailand an Australian accountant was gunned down over a business dispute involving a sugar mill outside Bangkok.

    In Dubai, two Australian property developers find themselves mired in a legal dispute that could see them facing a decade in gaol.

    The risks involved in being an expat worker are easily to overlook, particularly in places like Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore where the life is good for western expatriate workers – the reality for Filipino maids or Pakistani labourers is another matter of course.

    When things go wrong though, they go wrong badly and the reality of life in a foreign country can be a rude shock for expats who thought they were living a privileged existence.

    The guilded cage for expats is a nice, comfortable place to live in but it is a lot more fragile than many think.

    For Ken, he escaped being burned out of his site hut by an angry mob as we arrived before the torches were lit. Some frantic dishing out of notes to the crowd – I’m still sure many of those we gave money to didn’t actually work for us – defused the situation.

    Ken still got his Friday night beers at Soi Cowboy and took the whole saga as being part of a day’s work in Thailand, but then Ken was an old Asia construction hand who had no illusions of what could befall an innocent expat. Others might not have been so relaxed.

    Dubai image from SG777 through SXC.HU

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  • Fire and be dammed, the poor management at tech companies

    Fire and be dammed, the poor management at tech companies

    Microsoft manager Adam Orth has joined the ranks of those fired after some poorly thought out comments found their way onto the Reddit discussion boards. The firing of Orth illustrates a weakness in the management of tech firms.

    Orth’s firing follows the “forked dongle” affair where two developers lost their jobs over sexist comments at an industry conference.

    What’s notable in all these firings is how Playhaven, SendGrid and Microsoft’s management all summarily fired their employees for what at worse could be described as a ‘lapse of judgement’.

    One of the conceits of modern management is that risk can be eliminated, the mark of a poor manager is to act quickly to get rid of anything that could potentially be a risk.

    These tech companies are good illustrations of this – neither Adam Orth, Adria Richards or the Playhaven developer deserved to lose their jobs over this, all it required was an apology and commitment to be more careful about what they post on the public internet in future.

    All of us, including the sensitive and incompetent firing managers, have something on the internet that could embarrass us or our employers. In an era where people are quick to take offense, it’s easy for something taken out of context to spin out of control.

    That’s a risk beyond the control of middle managers at software companies.

    Hiding from risks or attempting to purge them is not the way to run an organisation. Strong, good managers can do better than that.

    Management manual image by Ulrik through SXC.hu

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  • Employment’s changing face

    Employment’s changing face

    Last Thursday recruitment company Talent2 launched its 2013 Market Pulse Survey looking at the employment trends across the Asia Pacific.

    According to the survey, things are looking good with 61% of businesses across the Asia Pacific forecasting growth and 45% expecting to hire more staff.

    However there’s an interesting underlying theme to the good news, employment is changing in large organisations.

    One of the give-aways is the fact that while nearly two-thirds of businesses expect to grow in 2013, less than half intend to increase staff. Businesses are doing more with less.

    Part of this is because of increased automation. Despite the headlines, productivity is increasing in workplaces – particularly offices – as technology automates many business functions in fields like logistics and workforce management.

    Another aspect driving the lack of employment is outsourcing, Talent2 say the proportion of Australians working as full time employees dipped below 75% in 2012 with a four percentage point drop over the year.

    With more businesses contracting work out, one could expect the number of sole proprietors to be increasing. However this seems not to be the case.

    The number of non-employing Australian businesses

    According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of sole traders is barely moving – between 2006 and 2011 the number of “non-employing Australian businesses” only increased 5% while the population grew over 8%.

    This implies the proportion of contractors in the workforce is actually shrinking.

    Much of this is probably due to the work going offshore, particularly to Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

    Saturday’s Australian Financial Review looked at what the BPOs are doing in the Philippines and they aren’t carrying out the call centre and basic clerical work that’s made up most of the outsourcing over the last twenty years. Now it’s management roles that are going offshore.

    The bigger issue confronting Australians, however, is not call centre workers being relocated to the Philippines. It’s low- to mid-level professional jobs, being moved out of companies, accounting firms and law offices.

    Legal outsourcing has been growing for a decade as large law firms have moved many of their para-legal and routine tasks offshore to countries where legal graduates are plentiful but work at lower rates than their western colleagues.

    An interesting aspect in legal offshoring is that much of the work that was done by young lawyers has now gone to overseas contractors, which probably means there’s going to be a shortage of experienced legal practioners in the medium term. This is going to have profound consequences for law firms and their partners.

    It’s also going to mean law and associated degrees are going to be less popular with school leavers as career prospects dwindle.

    The biggest impact though is for managers – we’ve grown used to the assumption that management jobs stay at head office while the lower level jobs go to the lowest cost provider.

    Now is those lowest cost providers are offering good quality management staff along with support desk and call centre staff.

    During the restructurings of the 1980s and 90s, it was blue collar workers who were the most affected by change. Now it’s the turn of the office workers and managers.

    It will be interesting to see how many of the people who thought they were secure in their roles deal with the uncertainty they now have. For some it’s going to be a tough decade.

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  • Why you won’t retire

    Why you won’t retire

    Outliving Our Super is the headline of an Australian Financial Review story on the problems of an aging population.

    Jacqui Hayes cites a billboard in San Francisco declaring that life expectancy will soon be 150 and we have to plan for longer retirements.

    The flaw in this discussion is the idea of retiring in our 60s. When the age pension was introduced in 1910, a new-born boy could expect to live 55 years and a girl, 59 years. The odds were against the average person every receiving the pension which was an effective, if ruthless, way of ensuring the solvency of social security programs.

    A hundred years later, a new born can expect to live well into their eighties. Meaning the average person will spend two decades in retirement.

    Making matters worse is the nature of that Millennial’s work pattern – when great, great grandpa entered the workforce in the 1920s,  he was almost certainly in his early teens and worked a solid fifty years paying his taxes before prospect of retirement arrived.

    Today, that child won’t enter the workforce until at least their late teens and more likely until their early twenties. A modern child is also going to have a much more fragmented work career and will likely have periods of unemployment or low earnings as a casual or contract worker.

    For today’s child to retire at 65 it would mean he or she will have had to saved enough over a forty year working life to sustain them for fifteen years of retirement, those numbers are tough and to achieve it most won’t be living the millionaire lifestyle during their golden years.

    With a life expectancy of 150, the early twentieth century model of retiring at 60 or 65 means today’s child would spend less than 30% of their lives in the workforce. Put simply, the numbers don’t add up.

    The reality is most of us won’t be retiring at 65, the baby boomers reaching retirement age now are learning this and it’s a lesson that’s going to get harder for the Gen X’s and Y’s following them.

    As a society, or an electorate, we can pretend there’s no problem and policy makers and politicians will pander to our refusal to face the truth by keeping structures that reflect early Twentieth Century aspirations rather than Twenty-First Century realities.

    We have to face the reality that the retiring at 65 is unaffordable dream for most of us. Once we accept this, we can get on with building longer lasting careers.

    Picture of pensioners courtesy of andreyutzu on SXC.HU

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